I'd had bad feelings about this trip, mainly because it was so short. I didn't expect this to happen though...
Back story:
Smudge has always been fairly wary of Stumpy, for some unknown reason (perhaps her boisterousness?) It came to a head when we did our road trip to Atlanta. We got back home, and Smudge had pooped in all the wrong places, and was hissing and growling at Stumpy whenever Stumpy looked at her the wrong way.
The cat sitter plead ignorance, but something must have happened while we were away. Smudge has been pretty hopeless around Stumpy ever since.
One theory was that maybe Stumpy (or Smudge) had some health problem, so we had them both checked out and no red flags were raised. The other option was to put Smudge on Prozac for a while to see if she settled down. I didn't like the idea of drugging her, so we've opted to separate them for a while. Smudge is in our bedroom and Stumpy and Lily have the rest of the house. Smudge and Stumpy only have supervised time together. We've tried a bit of play therapy as time permits, but it hasn't made much of a difference.
So fast forwarding to now, and we didn't want to leave Smudge in our bedroom all by herself for the week, so we thought we'd put Stumpy in a cat boarding place, since we figured she could handle it, and let Smudge and Lily have the run of the house. Our neighbour Carol was going to check in on Smudge and Lily. All good.
I think it was yesterday (my brain is not dealing with the various timezones plus jet lag) Sarah got an email from Carol saying that the cat boarding place had called her because Stumpy hadn't been eating, and was all lethargic. Carol went and brought her home, and she didn't do much better at home, she was just lying around, so she took her to our vet.
She was having breathing problems, and generally showing symptoms of congestive heart failure! Her blood work was otherwise okay. The vet said they couldn't do much and needed to send her to a specialist vet at Campbell, where they could do an ultrasound on her heart. This is where she currently is, in an oxygen tent on diuretics for fluid around the heart/lungs.
The prognosis isn't very good at all. She managed to make it through the night, but I don't know if she's going to make it until I can get home. I've moved my flight a day earlier to Friday night, so I can get out to the vet's on Saturday. The vet was saying that even if she does make it through this, her long-term prospects aren't good. Maybe a year.
This is only a four year old cat! The vet said she has an enlarged heart, so it's some sort of congenital condition she's always had, but was probably triggered by the stress of being in the boarding place.
It's just come as a total shock to us as she's always been really healthy, and the most hyperactive of the three cats.
Sarah, being the cat lover that she is, is particularly upset, because this is "her" cat, and she feels terrible because Stumpy is all by herself. I'm really hoping Stumpy can at least hang in there until I get there. I don't want her to die alone, despite how frustrating she can be.
We owe an enormous debt of gratitude to our neighbour Carol for doing a lot of running around for us. I don't doubt for a moment that Stumpy would be dead by now if it weren't for her.